So currently heading home from yorkdale mall after signing documents at my new place of work. Exciting! A lot of things are still up in the air though.. mainly due to the massive changes recently at home outfitters. Hopefully everything will work out soon.
It was kinda a little bit quite a lot embarrassing to ask for two weekends off in June before i even start training but it had to be done.
Will be trying my hardest to balance the new and the old but only if all parties are willing. Otherwise ill have to say goodbye to home outfitted and not look back!

Orientation starts tomorrow after my home outfitted shift. Gonna be a long day for sure.

So here I am in Toronto. Tally up one more naive, hopeful asian guy among the 5 million residents (49% of which are foreign-born) and who knows how many tourists here. Its a city with an interconnected system of subways, buses and steetcars, ‘loonies’, ‘twoonies’, and no flat whites. It’s also the place in which I am sitting here quietly thinking to myself ‘Where the heck am I meant to fit in here’.

My flights went well, although there was quite a lot of turbulence and thunderstorm action near the end. Seats were pretty good, there was an empty seat beside me on both my flights, which was pretty sweet. The Auckland to San Francisco flight ended up being delayed for an hour and a half, almost two hours – which almost made me miss my connecting San Fran to Toronto flight. Luckily it was delayed by an hour as well.
US Customs turned out to be pretty straightforward, though there was this one security guard that was really macho and made everyone really tense.

“YOU ALL BETTER STAY IN LINE TILL ALL YOUR BAGS GO THROUGH OR YOU DO IT AGAIN! YEAH, I CAN SEE YOU – YOU BETTER STEP BACK, YEAH I SEE YOU”

Tense, man. You probably had to be there though. Furthermore, enveloping all the hubbub of customs was the constant background noise of lost people being called for. English, French, Korean, Chinese, Japanese or German, you name it. It was literally nonstop though, because each foreign language had to be repeated in English as well. Strangely, its kind of fun not being the lost one this time.

ARRIVAL – was awesome, the plane banked pretty hard a couple of times, giving wonderful views of the marvellously super-flat and monstrous city that is Toronto. Before I realised it, we were on the tarmac, taxiing off into the dark.
The amazing smoothness of that landing however, was hugely overshadowed by the fact that there were loads of other huge international flights arriving at roughly the same time. I stood in line for Customs for nearly an hour and a half, shuffling along half asleep with three bags, bad breath and BO. When I finally made it though there were no problems and was soon waved along by the officer on line three, a.k.a ‘pretty cool sideburns guy’. I collected my baggage and shuffled along to meet Hanee.

..I’ll update a little more later, along with some pictures. I’m pretty tired at the moment and since i have to move along to the backpackers tomorrow, I figure I’d better catch some sleep.

[ okay, I was going to stop there, but Hanee is bleeping me on skype insisting that I keep going ]

Sooooooooo we got free coffee today from Coffee Culture. Upon ordering our Chai Latte and Regular Coffee Brew, the lady serving us gave us not two, but three cups of coffee. When we pointed out her mistake and subsequently tried to pay, she then did some sketchy calculations -ignoring us- and proceeded to GIVE us money instead.

All in all, after trying to balance it all out, we ended up with two coffees, a bottle of spring water, AND we were 0.70 cents up.

Updates!

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